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Wed 13 Dec, 2006 05:21 pm
Or perhaps a genius sandbagging as a moron?
"When you meet the President you ask yourself, 'How did it ever occur to anybody that he should be governor, much less President?'"
--Henry Kissinger, addressing a small group of scholars at the Library of Congress (unaware of the presence of a reporter), April 1986
In the spring of 1983, President Reagan and his team of hawkish advisors decided to intervene in Lebanon's civil war on behalf of Christian President Amin Gemayel. On March 24, the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit was dispatched to Lebanon where Moslem and Christian factions were fighting.
On April 28, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a van loaded with 2,000 pounds of explosives into the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Sixty-three people died, including seventeen Americans.
Four months later (September 6, 1983), two U.S. Marines were killed by rocket and mortar fire. At an October 19 press conference, Reagan was asked about the safety of the Marines in Beirut to which he replied, "We're looking at everything that can be done to try and make their position safer. We're not sitting idly by."
A few days later (October 23), another suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into the headquarters building of the First Battalion, 8th Marines, located at the Beirut airport. The resulting explosion killed 241 American servicemen.
Three months later, the Reagan administration removed American troops from Beirut and put them aboard offshore ships. Reagan described the retreat as taking "decisive new steps." Explained spokesman Larry Speakes, "We don't consider this a withdrawal but more of a redeployment."
Iran-contra
The Iran-Contra Scandal
"The United States gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees. We make no concessions; we make no deals."
--President Reagan, June 30, 1985
"I guess in a way they are counter-revolutionary and God bless them for being that. And I guess that makes them contras and so it makes me a contra, too"
--Ronald Reagan
Public skepticism increased further when the CIA was caught mining Nicaragua's harbors. When Nicaragua brought charges in the World Court against CIA aggression, the Reagan administration announced that it would not be bound by the World Court ruling.
Many in Congress were growing weary of CIA recklessness, including Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. Regarding the mining of Nicaragua's harbors Goldwater wrote, "This is an act violating international law. It is an act of war." Later, CIA Director William Casey would apologize to the Senate Intelligence Committee for keeping the Nicaraguan mining a secret.
"The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists.... Those charges are utterly false.... We did not--repeat--did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we."
--President Reagan, television address, November 13, 1986
"... was not fully informed on the nature of one of the activities."
--President Reagan, referring to the fact that money from weapons sales to Iran was diverted to the contras, November 25, 1986
"If he knew about it, then he has willfully broken the law; if he didn't know about it, then he is failing to do his job. After all, we expect the President to know about the foreign policy activities being run directly out of the White House."
--Senator John Glenn, November 25, 1986
"The simple truth is, 'I don't remember--period.'"
--President Reagan, responding to a question about when he authorized arms shipments to Iran, February 2, 1987
"A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."
--Reagan in a television address is forced to acknowledge "the facts and the evidence" uncovered the Tower Commission, March 4, 1987
"I told you all the truth that first day after...everything hit the fan."
--President Reagan, June 11, 1987
In 1992, former defense secretary Casper Weinberger was ordered to turn over notes of a January 1986 White House meeting. Weinberger's notes said, "President decided to go with Israeli-Iranian offer to release our 5 hostages in return for sale of 4,000 TOWs [U.S. missiles] to Iran by Israel. George Shultz + I opposed--Bill Casey, Ed Meese + VP favored--as did Poindexter."
Before leaving office in 1992, then-president George Bush pardoned Weinberger and five others who were facing felony charges stemming from Iran-contra. The Bush pardons effectively ended the Iran-contra investigation.
I am not a Reagan admirer. I have nothing good to say about him.
The fact that conservatives absolutely lionize the man reflects the intellectual bankruptcy of their movement...
In the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan told Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal, on two separate occasions, that he himself had assisted personally at the liberation of the Nazi death camps.
Dys, honey, that Reagan cartoon with the gun and the boots looks a lot like you when you're getting ready for bed, except you need to take away the gun. You cute thang.
Dys, honey, that Reagan cartoon with the gun and the boots looks a lot like you when you're getting ready for bed, except you need to take away the gun. You cute thang.
With all the genuflecting taking place at Reagan's funeral, I kept expecting him to rise from the dead after three days.
It is interesting to note that the episode with Sandanista leadership has left Nicaragua the most economically backward nation in Central America. The revolutions in both Nicaragua and El Salvador were financed and armed by the Soviets. We monitored the movement of weapons, money, and direction from the USSR through Cuba, on to Nicaragua and then across the Gulf of Fonseca to El Salvador. When we (in part through the Contras) cut the link to El Salvador, the "revolution" there suddenly fizzled out. Odd that those reporters who devoted so much space to the supposed "spontaneous revolution" or the Congressmen who hyperventilated so indignantly never noticed (or acknowledged) this connection.
In the light of the unfolding history, it is impossible to support the notion that Reagan was a fool. Indeed the case for his genius on the essential matters of the time is very strong indeed.
Perhaps the most apt comparison is of the writings of George Kennan (former ambassador to the USSR, senior State Department official, academic luminary at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies, and author of the so-called "Containment Theory" for the Soviet Empire) , with those of President Reagan (particularly the record of his radio addresses, written in his own hand).
The comparison reveals Kennan as very pessimistic with respect to the ability of Western Civilization & Capitalism to withstand the challenge of atheistic, authoritarian Communism in the Soviet mold. His containment theory was designed to give us time and to permit the Soviet system to (hopefully) evolve to something less malignant before its inevitable dominance spread. Kennan is revealed as one who liked the idea of freedom & liberty more than the fact of it. He scorned the vulgarity of American life and appeared to wish for the magic appearance of some benign authoritarian Platonic system, led I suppose by philosopher kings such as himself.
Another academic luminary, Henry Kissinger, devised his "detante" policy with the Soviets after the loss of Vietnam, also as a way of buying us some time in our decline relative to the supposed muscular Soviet State.
Reagan, on the contrary, emphasized the simple universal truth that individual freedom always yields a better, more enduring result. The authoritarian structures threatening us would inexorably wind down as a result of their own internal contradictions and by the fact of setting themselves in conflict with the human nature they imagined they could perfect or ultimately suppress. He expressed these truths at a time when the self appointed savants were predicting the opposite.
History has unambiguously revealed that Reagan was right on all the essential points, and the luminaries, against whom he was compared and found lacking, were dead wrong.
How do you define genius?
I think that this country has shifted so far over to the right that anyone who is a garden-variety Democrat circa 1972 is painted as a Marxist-Leninist.
I think Bush may indeed retire as the only neo-con left in D.C.
Vote early
vote often
vote Kucinich
As usual most of you are out of step with most Americans.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4631421.stm
The only thing Bush is right on is abortion. He has adopted many of the lefts needs. Believe me, had he governed like that as a Tx governor, he would not have made it to DC. Tx has moved more to the right, or had, now I don't know since it is officially northern Mexico
Diane wrote:Dys, honey, that Reagan cartoon with the gun and the boots looks a lot like you when you're getting ready for bed, except you need to take away the gun. You cute thang.
EWWWWW!!!! too much info.
Oh dadpad, I wasn't paying enough attention to your delicate sensibilities. Just put the mental image out of your mind. You'll really be fine, believe me, it will only take a few months of therapy.
Marx had to be a genius, darn it. This is so frustrating. How in the world can a guy like Reagan be a hero? We know he was a moron. And we know Marx was right, his plan should work, after all it works on paper and as taught in all the best universities by the genius professors that have studied this stuff all of their lives. And Reagan knew nothing. All he knew was what Death Valley looked like in his Hollywood days and he knew how to talk. But he was an absolute moron. We all knew it, that is all of us educated people. If we just get it right the next time.
dyslexia wrote:I think that this country has shifted so far over to the right that anyone who is a garden-variety Democrat circa 1972 is painted as a Marxist-Leninist.
I think Bush may indeed retire as the only neo-con left in D.C.
Vote early
vote often
vote Kucinich
You've sure picked a winner there, Dyslexia! Is Kucinich delusional or what? He would have to be to think he actually has a chance. What are you smoking lately Dyslexia?
There's serious myth and allegiance on this person, dys, and what you are doing here is no less adventurous than going to a trailer-park beer n burger cookout and bad mouthing Walmart.
On another thread, I mentioned the necessary counterpoint of derogation of Carter in the formation of the Reagan mythology. Here's something I bumped into this morning on Jeane Kirkpatrick...
Quote:Norman Podhoretz, who had been her editor at Commentary, disclosed near the end of an obituary he published in the Weekly Standard that she had grown disenchanted. "She had serious reservations about the prudence of the Bush Doctrine, which she evidently saw neither as an analogue of the Truman Doctrine nor as a revival of the Reaganite spirit in foreign policy," he wrote. "Even so, she was clearly reluctant to join in the clamor against it, which for all practical purposes meant relegating herself to the sidelines." But Podhoretz declined to reveal more details of her disapproval. Abruptly, he assumed the pose of a commissar, praising her "brilliant service on the ideological front" and awarded her "laurels" for what she "earned in World War III," though "what I persist in calling World War IV" failed to "tempt her back into battle." Comrade Podhoretz's oblique admission of her absence "on the ideological front" and the posthumous anecdote in the Times obituary are the runes of her alienation.
Jeane Kirkpatrick first came to public attention when her article "Dictatorships and Double Standards" was published in Commentary in November 1979. The Georgetown University professor's slashing attack on the Carter administration, appearing just as the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis began, became one of the principal theoretical documents of neoconservatism and platforms for the Reagan campaign. In this seminal piece, which immediately vaulted her to prominence, Kirkpatrick argued that Carter's adherence to human rights undermined traditional authoritarian regimes allied with the United States in the Cold War. "Authoritarian" states, she posited, could slowly change into democratic ones, unlike "totalitarian" ones. "The history of this century provides no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves," she wrote.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/12/14/jeane_kirkpatrick/
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/On_Bended_Knee.html
The press and the Reagan presidency. Much like the present day Bush, Reagan got away with murder in the press.
Ronald Reagan was smart enough to keep his "friends close & his enemies closer", This country was in darkness with RRs predecessor stumbling around in the dark, lusting in his heart, then there was morning in America when RR came to power. He was one of the most reviled presidents we've had....by neanderthals that had only democrat/liberal power on their minds.
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